The Memory Clause

The man in the corridor

offered me a button.

“One memory,” he said.

“Gone. No echoes.

No residue. No remains.

No footprint in the sands of time.”

He smiled like a disclaimer

stamped across absence.

I chose 2009.

A hotel room.

A goodbye

without a door that locked.

It vanished.

So did

my mother’s voice

from childhood,

its lullaby dissolved

into the spaces between heartbeats.

I didn’t notice

until I tried

to hum

a tune

that no longer existed anywhere in me.

I went back.

He offered another.

I picked 2017.

The night I called someone

I shouldn’t have.

It disappeared.

So did

the scent

of monsoon on concrete,

the taste of regret

that lingered in the throat,

the tremble in my own voice.

I kept going.

Mistakes.

Lies.

Versions of myself

I wanted unmade.

Each time,

something else left quietly —

a laugh,

a scar,

a taste,

a room,

a name.

Until one morning,

I woke up

with a clean mind

and a house

that did not recognize me.

There was a photo on the wall

of a woman I didn’t love

and a child

who looked like he used to.

The corridor was gone.

The man with the button

had forgotten me too.

I touched the walls.

They were real.

I was not.

And then I saw it:

my own face,

staring back at me

from the photograph on the wall —

smiling, breathing,

a stranger who owed me nothing.

Every vanished memory

had been a blade.

Every erased self

a lock.

And in that house that did not know me,

I realized the final truth —

I had unmade myself

so completely

that even I was now a ghost

passing through the lives of others,

and the world

had moved on

without me.

The button had worked.

I was gone.

And nobody cared. 

Not more than a fly on the wall.

Except me.

But I had become a metaphor now —

buried in verses

until someone dug me out,

took me for a brief walk in sunlight,

then returned me to my life-like coffin.

All because I was their obsession,

and they, my only mercy.